In preparation for Journal of Refugee StudiesThe conceptual starting point As I sat down in my doctoral viva across the table from Roger Zetter to present a thesis entitled 'Beyond the Politics of Labelling', the thought resurfaced that my choice of examiner may well have been illconceived. Zetter's work on this topic, published largely in this journal, inspired a generation of researchers to explore the role and value of the refugee label, becoming the automatic citation for any allusion to the ambiguity or malleability of the term. Indeed for Zetter (1988: 2; 1985), the founding raison d'être of the Journal of Refugee Studies was 'to explore the rich research agenda established by the label 'refugee'' and to 'examine and shape the form and extent of the margins at which the label applies ' (1988: 5).At the core of his work, and much of that which it informed and inspired, was a now well-established set of propositions. First, how the label 'refugee' is understood is highly changeable (Bakewell, 2002;
This article explores why certain spaces of refuge continue to be excised from global maps of forced migration. It first reviews why this exclusion happens, before synthesising work on the movements of forced migrants to states that are not signatories to the dominant refugee law frameworks. This exposes the partiality of geographies of refuge that rest on Western legal-normative conceptualisations of hospitality and humanitarianism. It argues that a focus on alternative sites and forms of refuge is nonetheless critical for 1) sketching accurate experiential and geopolitical maps of forced migration and 2) challenging dominant moral geographies of asylum and responsibility-sharing.
Despite the every-day prevalence of the term 'refugee', fundamental questions often remain unasked. What meanings do actors associate with the label? What intentions might be driving the word's use and/or manipulation? And what implications might the existence of multiple interpretations have for the persons under discussion and the processes within which they sit? Though this is evidently important in popular accounts, where the term's misuse fuels anti-immigration sentiments and societal mistrust, the ramifications of these multiple interpretations for assisting refugees and negotiating durable solutions have lacked critical exploration. Existing approaches to understanding the politics of the refugee regime have tended to focus on physical sites of contestation, such as refugee camps. This article re-introduces semiotics as a heuristic framework through which to understand how the word 'refugee' in itself constitutes a disputed arena, and to explore what impacts this has on negotiations over their future. This approach is used to explain the controversial negotiations surrounding the invocation of the Cessation Clause for Rwandan refugees in Uganda. Extensive resistance to the cancellation of Rwandan refugees' statuses has not been met by commensurate attempts to explain when, why and how this process unfolded. Through conceptualising the word 'refugee' as a sign according to the Saussurean and Barthean models of semiotics, this piece charts the multiple meanings that this label signified alongside its established legal-normative definition, and discusses what implications this had for how durable solutions were negotiated. Disaggregating the label provides a route through which to explore what enables the conceptual and spatial dissonance that plagues certain attempts to conclude protracted refugee situations. The piece concludes by discussing the analytical possibilities that emerge from re-engaging with socio-semiotic approaches, including through proposing greater engagement with the political geographies of words and their meanings.Recognising that the word refugee is fraught with competing interpretations is of course not new (Hilhorst et al.
Using Portes’ critique of research that ‘samples on the dependent variable’, this article identifies three particularly widespread and inter-related examples of this tendency within research on displacement, and particularly within the growing field of literature on refugee self-reliance. The first concerns the tendency to sample those in possession of particular labels; the second to sample those who inhabit specific spaces; and the third to sample those who exhibit certain forms of vulnerability. The article introduces the stories of displaced Eritreans in the Gulf States to show how these tendencies have resulted in particular sites and experiences of self-reliance being difficult to analyse, and thus systematically overlooked, within refugee studies. It concludes by arguing that categorical, spatial, and vulnerability biases within research on forced migrants can lead to a general confirmation bias that ends up inadvertently narrowing the meaning of key concepts and processes, and obscuring similar actions, including those with more positive outcomes, that may be occurring outside of established ‘host countries’ and under alternative labels.
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